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Graham Greene was born in England in 1904.
He had a miserable childhood and ran away from home once, only to return because "freedom bored [him] utterly."
At 17, he experimented with attempted suicide by playing Russian roulette several times.
Greene studied modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, and while
there he was, for a brief period, a member of the Communist party--not uncommon at the time. In his final year there
he published his first book, a collection of poetry (Babbling April, 1925). In the following year he converted
to Roman Catholicism--a decision that was greatly to affect his writing--and took a job as sub-editor of the London Times.
He worked there until the publication of his frist novel, The man Within (1929). But it wasn't until
his fourth novel, Stamboul Train (1932, released in the United States as the Orient Express) that he became
a popular success.
Extremely prolific, Graham Greene generally managed to turn out a novel
a year--and sometimes two--up until World War II. Brighton Rock (1939) was the first time a theological element
clearly emerged in his work, and two years later, he published what he and many others consider his finest work, The Power
and the Glory. During this period, the energetic Greene also worked as film critc for the Spectator, and he
began writing fast-paced, suspenseful thrillers like A Gun for Sale (1936, A Gun For Hire in the
U.S.), The Confidential Agent (1939), and The Ministry of Fear (1943).
After the war, Greene received further acclaim for two more theologically-oriented
novels (both set in Africa), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1961), and for The
Quiet American (1955) based on Greene's experiences as a newspaper correspondent in French Indo-China. He also
continued to publish popular "entertainments", such as The Third Man (1950), Our Man in Havana
(1958), and The Comedians (1966).
An inveterate traveler, who likes to use exotic settings for his novels,
Greene has also published travel journals as well as collections of short stories, essays, four children's books, five plays,
and an autobiography. And he has written screenplays--an activity he says he enjoys--for some of the many movies that
have been made from his novels. Greene is, without doubt, one of hte most prolific writers of modern times. But
more importantaly, as the Irish writer Sean O'Faolain, put it, Graham Greene is "one of the really significant novelists now
writing in any language."
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